Prepare your projects for the move to containers

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 Containers: 
Moving your applications to the workflow server in containers is a significant effort. To ease your transition, you can make changes to the applications that are running in the traditional environment before you move them to the container environment.

To prepare your project for a container runtime environment and reduce the number of incompatibilities and critical validation errors, you can take the following steps in advance:

  • For process apps and toolkits:
    • Move your process apps and toolkits from desktop Process Designer to web Process Designer. As part of this move, you must convert deprecated artifacts from desktop Process Designer to web Process Designer. You can continue to run your applications in the traditional environment and you don't have to make these changes later when you move to containers. See Deprecated and removed features of IBM Business Automation Workflow.
    • Replace deprecated APIs in your applications.
    • Upgrade to the latest version of the system toolkits. Switch to container compatible versions of system toolkits, if available. See System toolkits.
    • Refactor applications to externalize any custom J2EE or Java™ applications as separate services that run in their own container.
  • For case solutions:
    • Remove all deprecated features.
    • Remove Case Forms.
    • Ensure that all custom Content Platform Engine (CPE) event handlers will work in Content Platform Engine in a container environment.
    • Ensure that all custom IBM® Content Navigator plug-ins work in IBM Content Navigator in a container environment.

      For detailed steps for the Content Platform Engine and IBM Content Navigator, see Moving an existing P8 domain to containers.

The target runtime environment for existing process apps, toolkits and case solutions is traditional. You need to convert the target environment before you can install these projects to a workflow server in a container. Consider completing your move in stages. You can convert the target installation environment of your projects (and contained artifacts) to Traditional or Container and continue to run them in the traditional runtime environment. Then, when you're ready, you can switch them over to run in the container environment.

After you move your applications to run in a container, you might still have applications that are running in a traditional environment and you might need to support both streams. You can use branches to manage both streams. For example, you can create a branch for your traditional application before you convert and keep the current branch for the application that is running in the container. By separating the traditional and container branches, you can make fixes and enhancements to either branch as required. See Managing branches and snapshots.